The mobile phone contact-tracing app to tell people they may have been exposed to Covid-19, once a central part of the government’s response to the pandemic, will not be ready before the winter, a health minister has said.
Lord Bethell of Romford, the minister responsible for the smartphone app, said that it was not a priority for the government at the moment.
Speaking to the MPs on the Commons science and technology committee, Lord Bethell, the minister for innovation at the Department of Health and Social Care, also said the pilot scheme on the Isle of Wight had shown that people prefer to be contacted by a human being with the bad news, rather than by text message or email.
“We’re seeking to get something going for the winter, but it isn’t a priority for us,” he said.
In response to questions from the MP Graham Stringer, who said that “sounded like an argument against introducing it at all”, Lord Bethell said it was still the government’s intention to introduce the app.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, said at the start of May that the app would be rolled out across the UK in “mid-May”. When asked repeatedly about the delay, the government has insisted it is only a few weeks away.
Lord Bethell said that the government was not feeling great time pressure over the app, and it did not want to “poison the pool” by rushing something out that was not “quite right”.
“Apps around the world have been challenging and I know that the Norwegians, the Singaporeans, the French and others have all been working on their app releases,” he said.
Developed by NHSX, the technology arm of the NHS, the app is intended to send a notification warning to the smartphone user when they have come into close proximity to someone infected with Covid-19.
He claimed that the app pilot “has gone very well indeed and it has led to some infections being avoided”. But, he went on, they had learned the importance of the human factor.
“One of the things it has taught us is that it is the human contact that is the one most valued by people. And in fact there is a danger of being too technological and relying too much on text and emails and alienating or freaking out people because you’re telling them quite alarming news through quite casual communications.”
The call centres, on the other hand, had managed to break the bad news in a more acceptable way. “In fact the call centres that we’ve put together, although there has been, I know, a lot of press comment on it, actually have worked extremely well.
“And we’ve had to deal with people working from home and on new computer systems, but actually the training and the effectiveness of them has been proven. We’re very confident about that. So that is where our focus is at the moment.”
Earlier, Lord Bethell was asked by the chair, Greg Clark, when the test-and-trace system would be “world-beating” as the government had claimed it would be. Lord Bethell answered that “the scale of it is enormous – no other country is doing it on such a great scale” but it was “already showing some features which frankly are totally world-beating”.
The scale was one of those features, he said. He listed also the turnaround speed which, he said, has already “increased dramatically”, so that far more were being done within 24 hours – although he did not have the figures. Third was the logistical scale of what was being done, in terms of delivering and processing test kits, and fourth was what he called a “brand new consumer proposition”.
“We want people to trust the system and it’s a scary thing for people to approach, but we are working hard to make sure that people’s personal experience on the whole is good. And one of the things that we’re learning is that people like to have a personal touch. They like to have a telephone call rather than a text and we’re building on that particular insight to make sure that that local connectivity is in place.”